Outfitter Convicted of Scamming Hunters

It has been a long time coming but Andrew Wulf of Whitetail Ridge outfitters has been convicted of scamming hunter. He was convicted on 11 January 18 of two counts of felony theft and ongoing criminal conduct and faces up to 35 Years in prison. He will be sentenced in March.

Last year we reported on the story when Wulf was first arrested. He would charge hunters a down payment of $2500. Once the hunters arrived, they did not receive what was promised. A lot of victims were abandoned and never met by Wulf and the ones that did were given the run around.

The Des Moines Register posted the following incident. Kevin Williams, a 39-year- old plant worker near Baton Rouge, La.., said he and a friend each paid $2,500 for a hunting package that turned out to be a wild goose chase.

Williams said the two drove 13 hours from Louisiana for a post-Christmas hunt on the Iowa-Missouri border. He said Wulf told him the hunting stand they were headed to was only about 10 minutes away, but Wulf and a man Wulf called his cousin drove them more than an hour away in Missouri.

When they finally got to the hunting site, he said, the wooded area was about 30 feet from someone’s backyard.

“We were hunting while kids were playing in the backyard,” he said. “I told him, “Hey, this is the worst hunt I’ve been on.”

The next day, Williams said, Wulf didn’t show up after he had promised to take them to a new area. Instead, the man Wulf called a cousin took him to the same place and pretended to direct them to a different stand.

“I walked through the woods for over two hours and never found the stand,” he said. “That’s when we started texting him and saying “This isn’t what we paid for.”

In court this week, Andrew Wulf’s defense lawyer told a jury that his client’s failure to deliver was the result of recent personal problems that included a drunken driving arrest. He claimed Wulf was never given the opportunity to deliver refunds to disappointed customers who never received hunts for which they paid thousands in deposits, because he was serving time in jail at the time.

This is not Wulf’s first hunting related Convition. Five years ago, he pleaded guilty to two counts of aiding and abetting hunting over bait and was fined $195 for each count. The hunters he was guiding were also fined.